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Put #TebowOnYoSquad & Save Kids!

Ever wonder why at least one NFL owner doesn’t put Tim Tebow on his roster? Don’t get me wrong, this is not a debate about whether Tebow is any good or not. This is just a basic business decision, based on math. If the NFL is a business, why not make a smart business decision and pick a guy who sells tickets, jerseys and gets fans more interested in your business? Recent reports indicate that Tebow is still one of the most popular NFL players, even though he has not played a down in the NFL for almost two years! Regardless of whether you think Tebow can actually play football, he was at least good enough to play for a major college and to take an NFL team to the playoffs, so why not use one spot to add a guy who will increase your bottom line? Not to mention that everywhere Tebow has been, his teammates talk about what a positive influence he was on the team. Obviously I’m a Tebow fan, if not for emotional reasons then for pragmatic, business reasons. Tebow detractors, however, say that thoughts of him being a legitimate NFL QB are pure fantasy.

Did I just say fantasy? Maybe there is a league where there are millions of NFL team owners who can make Tebow’s NFL dream a reality (a fantasy-reality…which is a multi-billion-real-dollar industry, by the way) by adding him to their rosters? He can sit there on your bench as a backup QB. If nothing else, at least he can help keep your team morale up by being a positive influence on your other fantasy bench players who are not used to being benched. Oddly, 1.3% of all fantasy teams already have him, an inexplicable stat mentioned recently by USA Today‘s Chris Chase. That got us thinking. What if we tied Tebow’s fantasy roster position to a real world impact?

At MANA Nutrition, we think fantasy worlds are sometimes preferable to reality. The reality is that a child dies from complications arising from malnutrition every 8 seconds. That’s four in the allotted time to get off an NFL play. We have this fantasy that we could all live in a world where kids don’t needlessly die like this. So, we make a little peanut butter concoction called RUTF that comes in a packet about the size of an iPhone. When malnourished kids eat it, they don’t die. Nobel Prize winners like Doctors without Borders call RUTF “a revolution in nutritional affairs.”

One of our donors tossed out a challenge: Get 20,000 fantasy football owners to add Tebow to their squad and she would donate $100,000 to save malnourished children with RUTF! She’s offering $5 for every owner who adds Tebow (up to 20,000 owners). That would generate two containers of RUTF (1,800 cases!). If real NFL owners won’t claim Tebow for their own economic wellbeing, what if our fantasy-world owners would claim him for real-world impact? Besides, wouldn’t it be just like Tebow to save starving kids in his spare time without really even trying?

A daily dose costs about $1, so $5 would go a long way towards saving a child’s life as part of a six week treatment. To see the impact RUTF is already having, just watch 30 seconds of this amazing 60 Minutes piece by Anderson Cooper that shows RUTF saving lives.

So, while Tim Tebow may not be the savior that most football teams are looking for (or that his Heisman hype predicted), in a convergence of fantasy and reality, you and he can work together to save a child. In a world where stats really matter, maybe we’ll improve on that “one every 8 seconds” stat from earlier.

Use #TebowOnYoSquad to show us that you added Tebow to your roster and $5 will be donated in your honor!